Athlon 64 Or Pentium 4

yes, thermal stamina, reliability, compatibility, honesty, all of that stuff.

what about basing high opinions of AMD + others based on benchmarks they have cheated on? i know there is a history of unscropulous activity amognst various asian mobo makers and AMD. intel stands clear.

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Lackluster K7s? The Athlon outperformed the p3 and reached a speed roadmark first.

Chip remarkings? Fact: The remarkings were done by 3rd-party vendors looking to cheat retailers and customers. AMD had no part of it, and the exact same thing happened to intel.

Intel had 64bit before AMD? Sure, they had a 64bit cpu on the market before AMD. But Sun had a 64bit CPU out before Intel. So did IBM. And several others. But none of them a desktop cpu. To date, intel has still not released a desktop 64bit cpu. Itanium 2 was canned because of horrible it was, and Intel lost the 64bit bid to Microsoft.

Reliabilty? Of the 40 or so computers I've owned in the past 5 years, I have not had a single AMD processor fail on me. I have heard no horror stories from friends, nor seen any articles stating AMD is "unreliable."

Compatbility? Since the original Athlon, AMD has been 100% compatible with Intel's x86-64. The MMX technology that AMD uses is licensed from Intel and is also fully compatible.

Heat? An Athlon64 3400+ in a K8N produces less heat than a LGA775 3.4ghz Pentium 4.

Since the release of the thouroughbred B, Intel has reigned supreme in terms of how hot the cpu got. Not AMD.

Honesty? How is AMD dishonest?

IMO, you are simply baiting people. You have backed up none of your claims, and I think you are simply trying to incite a flame war. However, I've presented what I can while being civil. If you are going to back up your claims, please do so with something more tangible than what you've said so far.

If I base advice on opinion, I say as such. I do not do this much, however. I give advice based on bias-free (as much as possible) basis. Sometimes I reccomend Intel, sometimes AMD. I base it on what the person wants.

We were highly annoyed by the fact that Gigabyte sent us a board with a BIOS version that could not be coaxed into running slower than 202.9 MHz, meaning it's already 1.5% overclocked when it leaves the factory.

i don't have much time to go digging around for more stuff, but you can get an idea of the average asian board maker's outlook on overclocking and honesty with customers. mabye sometime later i'll tell you 'bout that whole amd/tyan mess i experienced awhile back.

The second two are rubbish: A 1% deviance in speed isn't neccessarily an "overclocked out of the box" factory board. Spread Spectrum allows for a tiny variance in exact clock generation to reduce EMI, not to cheat on benchmarks.

Check an intel board any day of the week. They vary as well. Every D865GBFL board I have built has given me a reading of 201.6mhz, not a solid 200mhz. So your point is moot.

The first one is a single manufacturer, a manufacturer that you earlier reccommended.

So-called "Asian" board makers aren't "devious" or poor in any way. Tyan is a king among board makers for a reason. ASUS, an "asian" board producer, has again and again been heralded as premium quality. Moreover, THG tends to be quite biased, and you've only linked to them. I want to see something tangible, not a single historically pro-intel leaning review site.

JET673_311 said:

Is the Socket 939 vs. 754 really a big difference?

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In terms of performance, no.

In terms of scalability, yes.

AMD isn't going to make any faster chips for the 754 socket, only 939. So if you build a box and plan on upgrading in the future, go for 939. If you don't think you'll be upgrading the cpu ever, stick with 754.

The second two are rubbish: A 1% deviance in speed isn't neccessarily an "overclocked out of the box" factory board.

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read the list, 225Mhz over 200 is 12.5% overclocked on that msi board, similarly for the cpu. numbers don't lie and thg is not biased.

and i never said that all asian products are bad or that all companies are bad. you misunderstand me, i merely imply that you have to be very careful in your mobo pick from asian companies on account of various issues. i have owned numerous asian boards and they have been great, but i looked into it pretty deep to make sure i wasn't getting a factory overclocked system.

The first one is a single manufacturer, a manufacturer that you earlier reccommended.

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i did reccommend it, if someone's finds it's clocking intolerable then they can choose to disregard it.

We can debate the merit of THG being biased or not, but we won't. However, the example provided is a single manufacturer out of dozens. Considering the number of problems and incredibly stupid quirky issues I have had with many Intel motherboards, the same can be said for any board. A board being "asian" doesn't mean you have to be "careful" or "picky". A few isolated cases aren't worth blanketing an entire industry, especially basing it on physical location. I.E. "asian" manufacturers.

an athlon 64 FX-55 can kick the P4's **** but will totally blow your budget.

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Another option to ease the budget is to go with the AMD 64 4000+ which is more or less a relabled FX-53 (the difference being that the 4000+ doesn't share the FX series unlocked bus speed multiplier for OC'ing).

This chip turns in very strong numbers only lagging slightly behind the FX-55 and still kicking the P4's *** while costing less than either of them.

I dont build computers but i use the **** out of them. My lackluster AMD
k-7 PC with only 512 DDR ram running windows XP, i hosted a game of medal of honor with 12 players and hosted a roger wilco communication program with 6 of us talking to each other. the gaming was virtually flawless. also i never shut off firewall or antivirus. we couldnt believe it actually. so... i guess i am biased now.

there were 'good' k-7's and 'bad' k-7's. the initial k-7 suffered from weak fpu performance.

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The K7's FPU was its strongest point at introduction & was far superior to the at-the-time Intel flagship, the P3.

I can only remember one bad thing about Athlons upon introduction & it was with the amd750 chipset which had to be set to agp 1x to work will with geforce cards. Other then that it was quite mature for a new platform.

AMD 64 is the next gen processor, Intel is just now on the 64bit bandwagon
allthough 99.9% os software is 32 bit...so it comes down to what you want to do P4 do better video encoding/decoding(not better, faster) but The amd is better at gamming. But as in clock speeds well here is a rundown

there were 'good' k-7's and 'bad' k-7's. the initial k-7 suffered from weak fpu performance.

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I think you've confused K7 with K6. The K6 was notorious for having a weak FPU, especially the sawtooth core and before (k6/2, k6, et cetera). Athlon (K7) has always had a very powerful FPU. The only real deficit to Athlon classic was that L2 cache had a 1:3 speed ratio to CPU speed, and shortly thereafter Intel released the coppermine which had full-speed L2 cache. This was corrected with the Thunderbird, which was an ungodly powerful beast of a chip.

The only real deficit to Athlon classic was that L2 cache had a 1:3 speed ratio to CPU speed

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so it wasn't the fpu it was the cache, i mistakenly said fpu before. needless to say, it sapped performance. and, we both said, later k-7's were much improved. and yes, the k-6 did have a pathetic fpu compared to it's rivals, like the 6x86 and the winchip.